Or, welcome to my low-maintenance heck.

Thanks to Buckley F. Williams for sending the article along. It's the standard lengthy exploration of the life and times of Rage Boy, parts of which are surely true, and some of which is likely fabrication. The basic idea is the same: He is the poor, noble Muslim who is parading against the evil and decadent West. You know the formula by now: Find the most vile and hateful comments in the blogosphere that you can, and publish them as if they're the only opinion on Rage Boy's theatrics. It never hurts to invent out of whole cloth a myth that all Americans have Rage Boy bumperstickers on their cars. But still, even after all of Mr. French's hyperbole, there's plenty to like about this story.

First and foremost, it would seem that Potfry's excellent Rage Boy merchandise is selling to exactly the right kind of people:

An intelligence officer at the Ministry of Defence in London told me he drinks his coffee from an Islamic Rage Boy mug.

I'll be continuing this beyond the fold. You'll definitely not believe what's coming next. Or maybe, you'll believe it all too well.

Bonus: If you'd like to see some of the photoshopped images of Shakheel Bhat that have aggravated him to such an extent, here they are. We received somewhere in the order of hundreds of responses to this contest request, the very best of which I permanently catalogued here on Snapped Shot. In the process of reviewing entries, I did make a point of deleting some which were truly horrific, by the way. There's a fine line between parody and indecency, and this site would prefer to remain on the safe side of it, which would hopefully be some form of consolation to Mr. French and Mr. Bhat.

To my surprise, Shakeel seemed to have no time for Bin Laden, although he does not believe he was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

"I heard that planes had crashed into the Twin Towers. I thought it was very bad that so many civilians had been killed. But afterwards I was told it was America's own government that had arranged the attack."

How could that have happened? "Money can make wonders."

But why would America have wanted to do such a thing?

"There is a strong lobby in the USA that opposes President Bush. He wanted to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. He had to justify that to his own people."

I think the core point woven throughout the story is not that Shakheel Bhat rages over everything, surprisingly enough. The most telling thing to me that is discussed by Patrick's narrative is that Mr. Bhat protests a distortion of what's going on in the West. Did you notice in the above where he was told the American government was behind 9/11? That seems to indicate to me a massive problem with how information spreads from the West to the developing world:—Whether through satellite channels such as al-Jazeera or CNN that are blatantly discriminatory towards Western nations, or through newspapers published by the various tinpot dictatorships that rule the developing world, whose dictators benefit the most from keeping their populace angry at external factors.

See, for instance, this passage:

He has demonstrated against the Pope's comments about Islam, against the sexual exploitation of Kashmiri girls, against police violence and 'encounter' killings and against the honouring of Rushdie. Why did he object to Rushdie being knighted?

"He has a reputation for Muslim-bashing," he said solemnly. "Why is the London government encouraging someone who does these things?"

I'm sure that if he were asked in detail, he would have no knowledge of what the Pope said that was so "inflammatory" towards Islam, that many of the rumours about the Indian paramilitary force overseeing Kashmir are nothing more than that, and that he couldn't identify a single reason why Salman Rushdie "had a reputation" for Muslim-bashing.

The script, which is what I was largely protesting in my original Professional Protester post, continues to be repeated ad-nauseam—Accepted by the self-hating West as fact, and encouraged by the dictators that thrive on staying in power. These street-parading Muslims are notgenuinely mad at the West. They are mad at what their puppetmasters tell them to be mad at.

But one thing's for sure: We have definitely run across convincing proof that Shakheel Bhat is not imprisoned—which was one of the theories as to why he hasn't been spotted in any protests lately.

So, if he's showing up to protests, the press is no longer interested in covering him, as they know that his theatrics are nothing more than puppetry.